【独家】李笑来回应一切（界面新闻专访）

[Exclusive] Li Xiaolai Responds to Everything (Jiemian interview)

> By Li Xiaolai · 2018-07-17 · [Original link](https://www.jiemian.com/article/2313153.html) (Chinese)
> Only Li Xiaolai's own answers; lines marked (Q) summarize the question and are not the interviewer's wording.
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

**(Q)** When did you learn the recording had been made public online? What was your first reaction?

At the time I was driving, and a friend called and told me to pull over right away and listen to it. I didn't stop the car; it was only 2 hours later that I found a place to sit down and listen to the whole thing. Afterwards, having listened to it, I felt it was nothing; apart from the swear words and naming names, which weren't quite appropriate, there was nothing in this recording that couldn't see the light of day.

That's just how I live: what I say in front of people and behind their backs is the same. I even have friends who declared, "From now on I'm not eating with Xiaolai anymore, because when you eat with him, the things he says you've already read in his articles..."

**(Q)** Do you blame the person who made the recording?

The person who recorded it is probably not a bad person, because I later learned that for a long time they had regarded me as a teacher, and they thought my understanding might be worth taking out and sharing. If they had asked my consent in advance, they would certainly have been refused, so they recorded it secretly.

From this point of view, the starting point was nothing bad.

**(Q)** But after the recording spread widely, everyone felt you had been "harvesting leeks."

Before this thing blew up on a large scale, many people in the circle had already heard this recording. In fact, as long as you listen to this recording carefully all the way through, or read the complete text version, you won't come to the conclusion of "harvesting leeks."

But after the recording affair suddenly blew up on a large scale, a large number of articles spread it with "Li Xiaolai harvesting leeks" as the headline. In fact I never even mentioned the topic of "leeks," and I have never done anything like "harvesting leeks," but this label was slapped on me.

And besides, what is a leek? If you lose money you're a leek, and if you make money you're the market manipulator? I think this is probably an idea held by people who don't understand the crypto trading market. In the traditional stock market there may be manipulators and leeks, but in the crypto world this is very hard, because crypto trading goes on twenty-four hours a day, there are more than ten thousand trading platforms around the world, and one coin is listed on multiple trading platforms, so the difficulty of manipulating the market is really too high.

**(Q)** It feels like quite a few people have clashed with you recently; have you made too many enemies in the blockchain world?

Because the blockchain industry involves money, there may be a small minority of people in it who are disgraceful, and topics get amplified more easily. But the blockchain industry as a whole is absolutely not like that, because there are large numbers of people doing serious work.

Looking back along the way, the people I've offended are basically all people I ended up not working with. But you can't blame me for that; people whose paths differ don't make plans together. It's just like the plot in the film The Godfather: someone comes to you to discuss selling drugs, and if you don't agree they get someone to kill your whole family. But I just don't want to sell drugs! Even if you kill my whole family I still don't want to sell them!

**(Q)** Is this recent period the darkest time of your life?

It's not really dark; it's more like the troubles of happiness. Last year at "94" it was more dangerous ([Jiemian's note: on September 4, 2017, the People's Bank of China and six other ministries and commissions issued the "Announcement on Preventing Financing Risks of Token Offerings," halting ICOs and rectifying all kinds of digital-asset trading platforms]); at that time public opinion described me with "a swindler's road to financial freedom," and it felt as if I had already been sentenced.

I didn't have these troubles before. When I was a New Oriental teacher, my annual salary after tax was six or seven hundred thousand, my course ratings were the highest in the whole school, school leaders would greet me when they saw me, every day after class I went home and opened QQ and maybe there would still be students' praise to feast my eyes on, and when I saw people I didn't like I could curse them as hard as I wanted; my sense of superiority was off the charts. Why? Because at that time the things I was actually doing weren't big.

Now it feels like I've boarded a high-speed train; the speed is too fast, faster than anything I've ever experienced before, so much so that I'm a little dizzy. But because it's the first time, you'd be like me: although a bit dizzy, you'd find a way to carefully take in that feeling and want to remember it. So starting last year I told myself: you no longer live in that previous world; you have to find a way to adapt to the present.

**(Q)** Have you really, one hundred percent, never lent your name to an air coin?

First you have to be clear about what "lending your name" (站台) means. Like some people: the project puts their name on it, and they get 1% of the tokens; this way of doing it is called lending your name. But I've never done this; if someone gives me coins this way I don't take them.

Our approach is either to invest in the project or to provide the project with valuable services, so the projects we have really taken part in are all ones we put money into. For example the Qtum (量子链) project: I invested 50 bitcoins at the same price as the other early investors, so this is investment, not lending my name.

But because investor education in the crypto world is insufficient, many times they can't judge the quality of a project and just follow whoever has invested, so it gets understood as lending my name. But in fact there are many projects I had no part in, and some projects even photoshopped my WeChat conversations onto their materials. In fact for more than 99% of the projects, it's my name that's being used without me; this is no exaggeration, it's a fact.

In the recording I'm said to have helped sell "air coins." This needs some explanation: in a recording you can't see the hand gestures I was making at the time. When I talk I actually often raise both hands, each with two fingers extended, bending them at the same time to signify "quotation marks."

At the time Qtum said it would build a bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I thought it was one of the only two or three reliable projects being done by Chinese people at the time. When I first came into contact with them, the project's code had already started being updated, and we had also had someone audit the first version of the code. Because the mainnet hadn't launched yet at the time, for a period it was indeed called an "air coin" by outsiders. But after the mainnet launched, nobody said that anymore.

**(Q)** You invest in trading platforms and also in projects and so on, covering the whole crypto industry chain. Doesn't this allow a lot of things to be manipulated behind the scenes?

There are more than ten thousand trading platforms around the world; no single one can cover the sky with one hand. The core essence of blockchain is to greatly raise the efficiency of financial markets. The traditional market doesn't operate very efficiently; with so many good projects in the world, how could you ever vet them all? Now there are more trading platforms, and financing and issuance are destined to develop toward disintermediation. So for a technology that drives the development of the world, nothing can stop it.

But the core problem now is that neither trading platforms nor projects are transparent. For example, a project gets listed on a trading platform and clearly spent 50 million, but the platform says it only received 5 million; where did the remaining 45 million go? Everyone wants to get a share of the pie in the process.

So this has also given rise to some of today's so-called "market-cap management" services; they use information asymmetry to sell high and buy low, and they are the ones who are really harvesting leeks. If a project is done well, does it still need this kind of service? Have you ever seen Bitcoin do market-cap management?

**(Q)** So in fact you oppose the crypto world's so-called "market-cap management"? Then how do you think market manipulation, hype and harvesting leeks can be stamped out?

By openness and transparency. As long as the infrastructure of trading platforms matures, a platform can disclose its number of users, today's number of trading users, the total daily trading volume, and, for any given coin, it can also disclose what percentage of the total circulating supply the trading platform's holdings amount to in total. The top thirty users in the total pool, the parties with funds flowing in and out, and so on. If it's one hundred percent transparent, I can prove to you that the platform hasn't joined in the trading...

So that users can come into contact with more good projects, we will work in this direction, but not just any project can get listed. These are exactly the things we want to do, but this takes time; on the platforms I've invested in it may still take at least about half a year.

Also, it's not that we want to take part in the whole industry chain; it's because we started taking part in this industry very early, and in the beginning the industry was very small and there were only so many things that could be done, so it was easy to try all of them... As time went on, a division of labor among people appeared. Look, there's no way I could ever make mining-machine chips; I can't even invest in chips well.

**(Q)** Did you make a lot of money from the EOS project?

I started investing in the team behind the EOS project in 2013; EOS counts as the fourth project we invested in. At the time we used 1.5 million US dollars to buy equity that has had no liquidity to this day, a 5% stake at a valuation of 30 million US dollars; now the valuation is 6 billion US dollars, up 200 times. As for the EOS coins I later held, they were all bought separately on the open market, but my habit is to buy and then just leave it untouched, so even if there's "profit," it's only "paper profit," or it becomes "floating profit."

And yet this one project alone may well make me the most awesome angel investor in the world in 2017, because this project grew so fast.

**(Q)** Why would you say something like value investing can't be believed in?

My original words were not to "blindly believe in value investing." Value investing is right in the long run, but investing has a time limit, and very few people in the crowd have the qualifications and ability to choose value investing. Take Buffett: investing for 30 years, he can do it, but the vast majority of people can't hold out through economic cycles.

What I said at the time was that my task is to explain the complete world, whereas value-investing theory can only explain part of the world.

**(Q)** The outside world is very curious about the size of your wealth? Can you say more about how you accumulated your wealth?

In 2011 I was very bullish on Bitcoin, and started buying at an average price of 6 US dollars, but at first I only bought 2100. Because the total supply of Bitcoin is 21 million, I thought that if Bitcoin were an economy in the future, having one ten-thousandth of it would be really awesome. Facts proved that today, 7 years later, 2100 bitcoins are close to 100 million yuan.

But later, when it rose to 24 US dollars, I couldn't hold on and sold three quarters, kept the principal, and took three times the profit out to go mining. But later the mining project failed, and I realized that if I was bullish on Bitcoin, I should use more money to buy it rather than mine it.

At that time Bitcoin had already fallen from 32 US dollars to 16 US dollars. I was lucky, too: when I worked at New Oriental I happened to have a tiny bit of New Oriental stock, and so had an overseas account with a little over a hundred thousand US dollars. I used this overseas account to keep buying and selling through the long bear market of roughly the next 10 months, until Bitcoin got to around two dollars and I really had no money left to buy any more, and only then did I stop.

Later CCTV interviewed me, and they asked how many bitcoins I had; I didn't want to give a specific number, and only said I had a 6-digit number of bitcoins and the first digit was "1." But the title "richest man" wasn't something I called myself; it was given by the media. Because under the circumstances at the time, I also knew there were a few people who might hold more bitcoins than me.

As of today, as far as I know, there are still people in China with more bitcoins than me, for example some miners, but the total number of such people won't exceed 3. In this process I've also had some losses; for example, when investing in companies I might need cash, so I sell coins.

**(Q)** What about income other than Bitcoin?

As for the various earnings from some other projects and so on, compared with my Bitcoin investment they're all a single hair from nine oxen.

Also, I wrote a column for Luo Zhenyu, with total earnings of 40 million; the Dedao (得到) platform takes half, and taxes take a bit more than half, so in the end what came to me was only a little over 9 million or so, and in the end it could only be paid out in many installments.

**(Q)** How do you spend all the money you've made?

My spending power isn't strong; I can spend very little money in a year. Xu Xiaoping thought I lived too plainly and wanted to remake me; he rented a place downstairs from his home for me to live in, and even bought me very expensive crystal glasses and such, but in the end he gave up on me, because I'm plain to the bone.

This is because of the consumption outlook formed a few years ago when I was at New Oriental. At that time my father was ill in hospital; my wife and I, the two of us, spent only about 150,000 a year, and all the rest of the money went to the hospital; this process lasted as long as 7 years, so my consumption outlook can't change either.

**(Q)** Then why did you suddenly buy two Porsches a while ago?

The business of buying two Porsches earlier was something I had no choice but to do in order to deal with other people's views questioning my wealth; if I were still 26 and bought two Porsches it might really mean something to me, but at my present age it doesn't.

If we're talking about what wealth means to me now: before, when I had no money, there were always people questioning you. If you don't have money, you feel unsure of yourself when you hit back at others. But now you'll find that because you have wealth, many times you don't need to hit back; the people questioning you will feel unsure of themselves, so many things in life have become a lot easier. This matter of wealth has made me a lot more modest, and on the whole made me more Nice toward people.

**(Q)** Do you feel your own IP traffic has helped your investing a lot?

In any field a personal brand has value; this has to be admitted. Isn't that so?

But this is certainly not my only advantage in taking part in investment. Obviously, thinking deeply matters more than anything. People who know me know that since 2003 I've lived publicly online under my real name, making public everything apart from my private life. But you'll actually rarely see me trying to please fans; I've always pursued my thinking being correct, and I rarely try to persuade others either. For example the book Make Time Your Friend (把时间当做朋友): I truly agree with it, so I also did things this way. If I really wanted to make use of fans, I wouldn't succeed, because what I teach is independent thinking.

I've always advocated independent thinking, but as soon as you teach independent thinking, the number of people questioning you becomes large. Isn't that so? You can observe this phenomenon in school: teachers who teach students to think don't necessarily get high ratings; if you don't teach it, students may follow blindly; if you do teach it, the first thing students learn is to question. Without questioning, there's no need to think, let alone think independently.

So, does whether I invested in some project have anything to do with whether you invest? Besides, nobody can achieve an investment success rate as high as 100%; I have times when I invest wrongly too. I have my freedom of speech; at worst I just won't say anything in the future; I have to restrain myself.

Everything I share is about growth; I think success isn't important, success is an end point, and growth is what's important, and independent thinking is a necessary element of growth, so: being my reader is fine, being my student is fine, but don't become some kind of "fan."

**(Q)** Do you think it's possible to make money righteously in the crypto world?

Completely possible. For example, you can buy coins, hold them without moving them, and look again after five or six years. But now the vast majority of people think investing in the crypto world is a zero-sum game, and the money you make is money someone else lost. But this is wrong, because it doesn't take economic growth into account.

In a bear market everyone loses money, and the money you lose isn't made by anyone else either; in a bull market you make money too, but is all the money made money that others lost? No, because in a bull market everyone makes money. Why? This is the economic cycle. If you bought Facebook ten years ago and held it until today, or recently bought Xiaomi stock and look back ten years from now, you'll certainly have made many times your money, even though both of them at one point fell below their offering price after listing.

Money made this way, where is there the slightest bit of unrighteousness in it?

Blockchain is an emerging market; in a place like this, compared with the world outside, there are more opportunities to make money, it's easier to make money, and you can make a lot of money without doing bad things, so why go and do bad things? Make unrighteous money? Besides, making that much money, can you spend it all? I certainly can't. Money you can't spend isn't really your money; think about it carefully and you'll see.

**(Q)** Why did you take part in the government-led Xiongan Fund (雄岸基金)?

The core application scenarios of blockchain in the future have no direct connection with the vast majority of ordinary people; in the future they will all be in public affairs.

Blockchain will certainly develop best in China, because China's public affairs are the largest and its population is the largest. For example, ID cards, vehicle licenses, marriage certificates and equity certificates can all use blockchain to avoid forgery and speed up efficiency. Requiring government agencies such as the public security bureau to mine, vote and issue coins is certainly not appropriate, so the biggest blockchain applications in the future may well be "coinless blockchain"—although right now the blockchain circle holds an attitude of contempt toward "coinless blockchain."

I personally believe blockchain will certainly change the world. Of course, blockchain will certainly change China too. The Hangzhou municipal government is very farsighted and very supportive of blockchain. When Xiongan was founded, media all over the world paid attention and were all "astonished," which fully shows that the Hangzhou municipal government's boldness exceeded the imagination of people around the world.

**(Q)** Didn't you say before that blockchain industrial parks are a joke?

The logic of industrial development is money > people > land; only if a place has ample capital and talent resources does that place have value, and then it certainly has value. So a few years ago I already said that I think if a new center appears in China in the future, it will certainly be Hangzhou. With the Xiongan Fund, the money is in place and the people are gathered, so this industrial park certainly has value.

**(Q)** Why did you recently announce your withdrawal from the Xiongan Fund?

Here's how it was. Two days before April 8 this year, a certain Chen (陈某某) in the circle even invited me to his birthday party, and to save face I went. The Xiongan Fund was formally established on April 9, but starting that day he turned against me in his WeChat Moments, fabricating all sorts of things to slander me, even though I had no personal grudge with him whatsoever.

Not only that, this Chen organized many people to make anonymous phone calls to people in Hangzhou government departments; he not only personally went to every leader he could find to complain about me, but also fabricated all sorts of facts to slander me, saying I was a con man. Well, I couldn't let government departments and the Xiongan Fund bear unnecessary pressure from public opinion because of me, so I'd just withdraw; it was that simple.

So in the 3 months since its founding, the Xiongan Fund has already invested in a dozen or so projects and has already made some contributions to driving the development of the blockchain industry. I believe the Xiongan Fund will certainly make more and greater contributions in the history of the development of China's blockchain industry.

**(Q)** Who are you most optimistic about in the blockchain industry?

Jihan Wu (吴忌寒) of Bitmain. I think this person is a warrior in the blockchain industry who bears wounds and blood. About three years ago I also said this to a friend: if there's one opponent in this world I might not be able to beat, it's Jihan Wu. It's just that we happen not to be on the same track, so that's also my luck.

**(Q)** Your childhood friend Luo Yonghao is toiling away at the real economy while you do blockchain; how do you see the relationship between blockchain and the real economy?

Finance is a manifestation of the real economy. Finance cannot exist detached from the real economy. Blockchain will certainly drive real industries, but in what way it will drive them is still unknown now.

I very much envy Luo Yonghao for working in a real industry; his sense of happiness is higher than mine, because the sense of achievement in making a phone is much greater than mine in doing an unknown industry, and they also gain social recognition more easily.

**(Q)** After the recording leaked, did Luo Yonghao comfort you?

Our habit is not to make a sound when we run into trouble, because how to comfort others is a very hard thing to begin with. But afterwards we'll chat together about what happened.

Do you have any other questions? Today is my birthday, and in a while I'm going to have dinner with my wife.

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